


Emperor of Phoenixes

by Pseudothyrum



Category: Black Books, Line of Duty, Misfits, Whitechapel (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grand Unified Craig Parkinson Theory, Implied Past Child Abuse, Massive Multiplayer Crossover, Self-Esteem Issues, look it totally makes sense that they're all the same person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:39:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudothyrum/pseuds/Pseudothyrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rising from the ashes again and again, reinvention has always been a strong suit for the boy nobody cared about. Snapshots in the life of a self-made phoenix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emperor of Phoenixes

**Author's Note:**

> This is my attempt to write what I describe as my Grand Unified Craig Parkinson Theory, in which a number of the actor Craig Parkinson's characters relate to each other in some way. This is utterly ridiculous, and I'm not even a little sorry.
> 
> Thanks again to my lovely beta, for putting up with my self-indulgent worrying.

Multiple births are fairly common in IVF, their mother is told. Twins are more likely, but sometimes, sometimes you get three. 

Three perfect boys. 

Jimmy and Johnny are everything their mother could wish. They take to the legend, they live and breathe it. Jacky, Jacky doesn’t quite fit. He goes along with his older brothers, older by mere minutes, but he is not one of them. It baffles him when he is young, but their mother doesn’t seem to notice or mind. She wanted two, two perfect boys. Jacky is surplus to requirements, and he knows it. Nobody bothers to watch him, really, and he is largely left to his own devices through his childhood, when his brothers aren’t using him for their schemes. He never speaks of what happens next door during the summer they turn ten, and nobody cares enough to ask about the bruises or the tears. He moves past it, he isn’t as important as his brothers anyways. He doesn’t really matter at all. 

When they’re fourteen, he tells people he’s caddying at the local golf club, to explain where the money’s from. At first it is just caddying, but then it goes beyond that. Tommy tells him that he’s lucky, that he is pretty and clever, and that he should keep his mouth shut. Jacky wonders what his brothers would say about that, but he never tells them. Half of him is afraid that they’ll kill Tommy. The other half is afraid that they won’t.

When they turn eighteen, his brothers go to the Congo. Jacky doesn’t. 

***

Martin, as he is calling himself (he always hated to be called Jacky, it’s a girl’s name, but he had to fit the pattern, didn’t he), still doesn’t have any luck. He doubts his brothers would be proud of his criminal endeavours; rolling drunken idiots and convincing gamblers to take loans at exorbitant prices to fund his own habit isn’t quite equivalent to their own plots. They’re off running their federation of crime, as their father would have wanted. He wouldn’t have wanted a trio, especially not a set so flawed as one with Martin in it. A gambling addiction is a weakness. He’s always been the weak one. 

He makes a lot of money as a loan shark, but he always manages to lose it again as well. The last time he does it, he convinces an Irishman to join him and his friends in a game of cards. The man is hopelessly naive and goes along with him, and soon he owes Martin £20,000. He gets it in full, but only after he and his friends lose just about as much to a pair of surprisingly shrewd American tourists. 

The problem, he thinks, is that he still has Jacky in his heart. He can change his name and move away, but he’s still made of the same rotted materials, still crumbling away at the core. He sits in his terrible flat, surrounded by the ghosts of his wasted life, nursing cracked ribs and a black eye and a broken ring finger and he makes a decision. He destroys the flat, destroys everything he has that is Jacky. He burns it all in a skip, and he burns away the ruined parts of himself, the parts that are Jacky, the parts that are Martin, the parts that are weak and useless and powerless and forgotten. He watches smoke curl lazily up into the sky, and he forgets what it was to be them. 

***

He decides Matthew suits him better than Martin (and better still than Jacky, who didn’t suit anything). In a fit of rebellion against his brothers’ growing criminal legacy he joins the police. It’s a good job, and he finds he enjoys it a lot more than loansharking, though he doesn’t bother to keep anywhere close to the straight and narrow. Nobody realises his connection to his brothers, and he perpetuates this by staying the hell away from Whitechapel, where they seem to have become determined to wreak havoc in the life of one of the DIs. It’s none of his business. 

At first, he is someone who people have to listen to. He is someone who matters, someone who is good at something. And the job gets him out of gambling (finally), and that lands him on Tony Gates’ team. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he is weak, he is beholden. It isn’t like with his brothers, always pressured to fall in line and live up to their glorious destiny. It isn’t like the desperate weakness of childhood, or the cowardice and inefficacy of Martin. It’s knowing that he owes something that can never be repaid, not really. He grows resentful of Gates and what he owes him, and Tommy offers the perfect way to dispense that debt. 

He finds that he doesn’t hate Tommy, Jacky hated Tommy and Matthew is nothing like him. He goes along with his schemes, walking comfortably on both sides of the law. They never talk about their shared past, Matthew feels no compulsions to. Jacky was a long time ago. Jacky doesn’t exist anymore. 

***

Things turn sour, as they so often do in his life. His brothers are dead, his allegiances exposed. He slides sideways out of Matthew’s skin, and into Shaun’s. Shaun, who doesn’t care about anything more than is required by his job description. He’s working with a very strange set of kids, and if he could stir himself to care he’s almost completely certain that he’d find out they’re up to some very weird shit. Drugs, probably. But he’s hardly one to be casting stones, so he leaves them be, and seems to earn a little grudging respect for it. 

Things end badly, as they always do. Shaun’s breathing is growing ragged, and it hurts, it hurts so much. The kids are babbling something about superpowers, about how it wasn’t really the chavvy one who stabbed him at all. He laughs. He should have figured.

It’s getting dark, there isn’t a spark of light left to see by. Shaun closes his eyes. Matthew takes one last breath. Martin lets his head fall to the side. Jacky dies.


End file.
